Blog archive
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Postcards from the Future
Climate activism frequently involves a focus on the negative; with dire climate news constantly in the media and a discouraging lack of action from government bodies, it becomes easy to focus on what we are trying to prevent rather than the world we hope to build. In this workshop, we are flipping the script. Participants…
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StACCS welcomes new team member
We are delighted to announce that we have a new, full-time team member: Dr Edward Christie has joined StACCS as a Research and Engagement Fellow. Edward’s appointment is a significant milestone for the Centre, which will help to accelerate our activities and priorities. Strengthening our commitment to interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability, Edward brings expertise in the arts…
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Leading for Tomorrow: an ‘in conversation’ event at the Wardlaw Museum
As part of the StACCS/Wardlaw Museum exhibition Rewrite the Future, StACCS Co-Director Louise Reid and a panel of elected representatives at local and national level will be discussing what kind of future they would like to see, and what it will take to get us there. The event takes place at the Wardlaw Museum at…
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StACCS internal project funding call
We are pleased to announce a call for project proposals related to sustainability research, to be led by members of academic staff at St Andrews. We are looking for projects of anywhere between a few hundred pounds and £5000. What do you need to help you get a sustainability research idea off the ground, or…
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Rewrite the Future: Wardlaw Museum exhibition opens this weekend
Many of us at StACCS have been busy over the past nine months working with a team from the University’s Wardlaw Museum to put together an exhibition showcasing a range of sustainability-facing research at St Andrews. The exhibition, Rewrite the Future, aims to go beyond the typical focus of the sustainability discourse on environment and…
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Inaugural ‘Careful Research’ Spring School
It was a pleasure to host the first of what we hope will be many Spring Schools, working with early career researchers to explore how we can undertake transformative sustainability research in line with our values. The “Critical Sustainability Research: Careful, Participatory, and Emancipatory Research Methods” Spring School was co-developed by StACCS and colleagues at…
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What does ‘critical sustainability’ mean? A new StACCS project takes shape
The title of our centre, ‘Critical Sustainabilities’, signals that one of our key aims is to hold the very concept of sustainability up to a critical light. The risk that thinking around sustainability could be watered down is hardly a new concern. Just five years after the Brundtland Report (1986) brought the concept of sustainable…
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Call for applications: Careful, Participatory and Emancipatory Research Methods – ‘spring school’
Applications are invited to take part in a four-day in-person workshop or ‘spring school’ in St Andrews on 12-15 May 2025, on the theme “Critical Sustainability Research: Careful, Participatory, and Emancipatory Research Methods”. We are very excited to be running this event in collaboration with our good colleagues at the University of Bonn’s Centre for…
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Sustainable Uplands workshop
We were pleased to welcome colleagues Prof Robin Pakeman and Dr Stuart Smith from the James Hutton Institute for a focused workshop at the Botanic Gardens to discuss the science and logistics of long-term experiments and monitoring. JHI has a sizeable network of such long-term studies and we had a very thought-provoking discussion about how…
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AI and Sustainability
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is omnipresent. Not a day goes by without AI being in the news, whether it’s the success story of a new public health initiative or optimisation of energy grids, deep concerns about dataveillance and digital inequalities, or the exploitation of critical minerals and the people who harvest them. Indeed, in September 2024,…
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Sustainability Week: a recap
‘How do we support people to be more sustainable?’ was a question I heard raised many times over the past week. That’s because it was the University’s inaugural Sustainability Week, a week full of activities from panel discussions, keynote speakers, and workshops to hands-on practical activities such as tree planting, bird walk, and ‘meet our…
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Sustainable landscapes
We were delighted to host Pete Cairns of Northwoods Rewilding, one of this year’s Prize for the Environment finalists, for round-table discussions of the potential for trans- and interdisciplinary research, on Friday 1 November 2024. We spent a very convivial couple of hours enjoying (in the words of one participant) a ‘pico-sabbatical’ at the Botanic…
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Activism and environmental change: film screening and book launch with Adrian Fisk
In keeping with our interests in finding creative ways to address sustainability issues, Dr Charlotte Lee is pleased to welcome photographer, author and film-maker Adrian Fisk to St Andrews this November. Adrian will be screening his recent documentary JUSTNORTH, which documents the ways in which different communities around the Arctic are coming to terms with…
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AI and Sustainability panel discussion
Dr Louise Reid, co-director of StACCS, will be chairing a public panel discussion on the topic of “AI and Sustainability” on Wednesday this week. Following the recent widespread realisation that generative AI tools like ChatGPT have suddenly become so capable that they risk replacing much human work, there has been enormous interest (excitement, fear…) about…
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Water Resilient Dundee
On Wednesday 13 November 2024 Dom McBennett and Emma Robson from Scottish Water, who are involved with the Water Resilient Dundee Partnership, will be visiting St Andrews to talk about their plans for more sustainable approaches to water management. The holistic approach to this project, collaborating between industry and local communities, should lead to an…
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Sustainability Week events
StACCS-facing colleagues are running several events as part of the University’s inaugural Sustainability Week, as part of our drive to promote and nurture critical sustainabilities research. Monday 28th October: Dr Lydia Cole is co-organising sustainability-themed tours of Eden Campus with Karen Primrose for University of St Andrews staff and research students. Come along to find out…
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Reuben George event
We’re pleased to be supporting a panel event with Reuben George, Mike Simpson, Jess Hope and Ariadne Collins to discuss Reuben and Mike’s new book ‘It Stops Here’. In the words of the publisher, the book is “a personal account of one man’s confrontation with colonization that illuminates the philosophy and values of a First…
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StACCS/Wardlaw Museum project
StACCS and the University’s Wardlaw Museum have begun a new collaboration on an exhibition and events programme in summer 2025, with the working title “Imagining Sustainable Futures: What Stories Do We Need?”. The recently-redeveloped Wardlaw Museum has become a focus for just the kind of interface between academics and the world at large that StACCS…
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A Sustainability Tour through Bonn
Dr Sandra Gilgan, Head of Unit for the Bonn Research Alliance (BORA) & Co-Lead of the Working Group “Alternative Sustainabilities”, University of Bonn, shares her reflections on the partnership between St Andrews and Bonn. It was a sunny Tuesday morning when I picked up four wonderful colleagues from the University of St Andrews – Ian,…
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St Andrews hosts colleagues from Bonn
Pia von Falkenhausen from the Vice Rectorate for Sustainability at the University of Bonn writes about her recent visit to St Andrews as part of a delegation funded by the StACCS/SEEP project. As part of the Scottish Educational Exchange Program (SEEP), I was able to be part of the staff exchange between the University of…